THE campaign line is almost always the same: For the incumbent, the battlecry is for continuity and the need “to finish what (one) has started; for the challenger, it is to change and make better what the present dispensation has offfered. Human dynamics at work – one builds, one destroys; one sees ideals, the other bewails obsolescence.

Promise — that is all an election ever meant and stood for, thru the ages.

All too often, it is left by the wayside after the winning and the inauguration and like the Mona Lisa, it lies there and it dies there.

As in all past public selection of our leaders, we, the people, are now left to perceive who among those parading themselves as candidates is the statesman and who, the politician.

Like chameleons, their colors could change with the environment. Today’s statesman could well become tomorrow’s politician, and tomorrow’s politician could, well, become a professional politician and die as one.

Ideals are meant to be corrupted. We see this in the many stories of young, bright-eyed men starting out good in the world of politics, eager to make the difference and bearing school-bred manners only to end up being, as they often say, “swallowed by the system.”

Youth is not always better in elections. The dynamism, the verve, the adrenalin, the daring may all be there but the wisdom that comes with age, and aging, is often sadly lacking.

And yet, having said that, we know the serious matter of governance is neither reposed exclusively in the young or the old – neither actually having a monopoly of enthusiasm and intellect –but in the community itself, age undetermined, whose collective empowerment in freely electing its leaders among the aspiring and the grizzled veterans is what makes the village a nation